The best way to fund open source maintainers
Open source needs funding. That isn't a novel take. We all know it and every web developer actively uses open source, but why don't we all give back?
To be honest, it's expensive and high maintenance. GitHub sponsors is effectively an Open Collective copy, and they both require someone to be pretty financially stable in order to have funds to throw at random packages we think are cool. Additionally, giving a donation is a much larger commitment than throwing the repo a "star". Donations occur monthly, and after a few months I find myself looking at my credit card statement wondering if my donations are up to date, if I even use those packages anymore, or if the package I'm donating to is even maintained anymore.
So some friends and I built Flossbank. Flossbank is a package manager wrapper that takes package snapshots on every open source install (currently npm or yarn), and during the download time (we all know that was wasted time anyways) Flossbank shows a tech tool advertisement. When the install is finished, the ad goes away and you continue your workflow like normal. Flossbank then distributes the revenue from the ad you just saw to the package(s) you just installed, as well as all their child dependencies.
That's it. That's how easy it is to support open source maintainers and authors. No change to workflow, no managing donations, no financial commitment, no slimy selling of data, just see a tech ad during install / download time and know you're doing your part to support the maintainers and authors we all love. (curious how it works? our CLI is open source https://github.com/flossbank)
We'd love if you checked out https://flossbank.com and commented with any feedback or questions or comments! Thanks hackers,
Excited to use this to build open source!!
Hey there,
I've seen package manager based monetization approaches such as scarf.
This sounds similar to https://github.com/feross/funding
Also, I've created a list of open source monetization platforms here https://www.oss.fund/
You can make a PR and include your project there too. I'll make sure to spread the word on twitter.
Cheers
Yea! Similar to scarf and similar to funding however with specific differences that make flossbank far less intrusive and more efficient.
I'll open a PR to oss.fund to outline the nuances, thanks Bibryam!
Isn't this similar to Codefund.io?
Only in the sense that we serve ads, otherwise not really. We wrap package managers and show ads in the terminal where as codefund.io serves ads on like github readme pages.
More so - flossbank is opt in by users of open source, moving the onus away from maintainers to self promote themselves or their packages to make money, and moving it into the people who actually use the package. We think maintainers shouldn't have to do anything but code, and if their packages are used, they should get compensated
gotcha! Looks like a cool concept mate. Being an open source contributor myself, I am quite excited about it, but I am not sure whether the users would accept a new CLI that displays ads over npm/yarn?
Flossbank actually wraps package managers, so no change in current behavior for users! Once installed (takes like 30 seconds) then Npm install and yarn install work as usual. I agree learning a new CLI would be too much
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Great question!
Exactly, ads give an alternative to those who don't have the financial means to contribute monthly via a donation. As for the distribution - we wanted to highlight that we don't just give to the package you typed in, but rather all their child dependencies as well.
If I run
npm install standardfor example, the ad revenue will be split between standard as well as all standard's top level dependencies, and then all the top level deps of those top level deps, etc. all the way down the dependency tree. That way, even low level packages that are rarely installed by name, still get the compensation they deserve.This distribution happens for ad revenue as well as if you opt-in to donating instead. We hope it means that maintainers can do less self promotion and get back to the programming that they love!